I’ve started doing Pilates, with the aim of finally addressing some of the muscle imbalances that cause me pain in the second half of Chain Reaction, and that almost certainly are holding me back performance wise. It’s both frustrating (tiny movements through tiny ROMs that are, nevertheless, wickedly hard), and illuminating. I have all kinds of messy recruitment patterns, and the glute strength of a teenage girl (apparently).

I’ve been commuting 2-3 times a week, all CX. It’s fun, it’s a great mental break between home and work, and, most days, it’s easy to hit the hills and single track hard — which transfers well to road riding.

Ok, so, that’s what’s been going on. This was supposed to be just a gentle Sunday roll with DC on his return from Bali, but we wound up hitting some decent climbs, and doing some respectable times up them. In my first road ride in a while, I was pleasantly surprised at how some of the climbs I usually think of as ‘always tough’ were now ‘discretionarily tough’; meaning I could set my own pace and push as much as I wanted.

There was a little half-wheeling, and though I’m not going to pretend DC couldn’t have dropped me at will, I wasn’t shooting out the back like usual either.

The final sweetener was coming home and finding I’d set a PR on my favourite benchmark: the full Antoinette/Mt Pleasant TT, which I’d done as a sneaky extra loop before meeting Dave.

I met up with Andrew Logue for a free-form exploration of trails along the Plenty River and Westerfolds Park. Though we probably weren’t ever further than 20km from home, it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere most of the time.

We hit a number of 10%+ climbs, some sealed, most not, and I learned that skinny little CX tyres don’t have anywhere near the bite of a MTB tyre. When the cadence slows, the gears are higher, which means getting out of the saddle. But once the speed is that low and the torque that high, traction is almost always going to go. The solution is to hit every climb like an attack. Keep the speed up, suffer the pain and push on to the top of the climb at maximum effort.